Idle Freeze

[foxAsteria]

I love the Offline Render (Idle) feature. I can accumulate a number of renders in the render queue and render them all at once, in the background and at my leisure, and I can still use my computer for other things while I wait.

Sure would be great if the same idle rendering could be applied to track freezing, which is generally not quick or convenient. Better still if we could continue to use Reaper while the tracks freeze.

[jepamb]

can you please explain what "idle" does? thank you.

[foxAsteria]

"Idle" CPU basically means spare processing power; whatever your computer is not using. Regular offline renders will use as much as possible to render as quickly as possible. But if you want that power for anything else, Reaper can simply render more slowly using only idle CPU.

I don't find that idle renders are too much slower than fullspeed, but I can still use my computer for other things while I wait, which is especially nice if I have a lot of renders.

[BaniBani]

+1 wouldn't have thought of that...

[geraintluff]

In terms of using Reaper while the freeze is happening: one challenge is that you end up wanting to use plugins and resources (potentially even external hardware) simultaneously for both the background render and the foreground editing that you continue to do.

I came up with a possible solution that I think could work (based on caching the output instead of doing a separate render), but there might be others.

[foxAsteria]

Yes I can see how external hardware would be a problem, since obviously you can't instance that into the background while continuing to use it in the foreground. But if you look at the way Idle Render works, it's actually creating a new project file and rendering it in the background with spare CPU, so I imagine the same thing could be done on the track level. I guess Reaper would need to temporarily disable hardware sends for any hardware involved in the freeze.

[mb945]

This would be great to have. Not so I could use Reaper to do other things while freezing but just so I could use my computer still and Reaper wouldn't take up 100% of CPU. There should be an option to do an Idle Freeze.